Kelly Stevens

Assistant Professor

Public Administration

Kelly A. Stevens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration, and a Renewable, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems (RISES) research cluster initiative member. Prior to joining UCF, Stevens completed her PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and was a visiting student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Engineering and Public Policy program. Dr. Stevens’s research interests broadly include energy and environmental policy, environmental management, and science and technology policy. Dr. Stevens first became interested in energy and environmental issues while pursuing her master’s degree in meteorology at Florida State University, where she later graduated with a second master’s in Public Administration. While pursuing her MPA, Stevens worked in Tallahassee as a meteorologist for the State of Florida in the Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Air Resource Management for five years.

This course offers various approaches to studying and explaining the United States intergovernmental system, with an emphasis on federalism and inter-organizational activities. This course considers how responsibility for addressing various policy issues is or should be assigned to different levels of government, and how these distributions of coordinate or overlapping functions work out in practice. This course evaluates the fundamentals of intergovernmental administration from a legal, political, fiscal, and administrative perspective, while reflecting on current topics in local, state, and Federal politics. There is a focus on emergency management and homeland security applications throughout the course, however we discuss multiple policy areas including environmental, health, and financial policy in addition to relevant, current topics.

PAD6616: Economic Principles for Public Policy and Management

This course presents the economic concepts, relationships, and methods of analysis that are relevant for public sector management decisions and policy analysis. Basic concepts and principles such as demand, production, cost, pricing, and cost-benefit analysis are discussed. The course builds on these concepts to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of economic analysis in public sector decision-making.

PAD6700: Research Methods for Public Administration

This course provides a foundation in the theory and practice of applied research methodology in public policy and administration. These methods are used in program evaluation, monitoring social programs, performance evaluation, and assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of their impacts. Evidence-based policy and public management aim to improve government effectiveness by developing and utilizing a rigorous base of information and scientific evidence to guide decisions about program design, funding, implementation, evaluation, and management.